An EFQM model self‐assessment exercise at a Spanish university
| Published date | 01 March 2006 |
| Date | 01 March 2006 |
| Pages | 170-188 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230610652051 |
| Author | Juan José Tarí |
| Subject Matter | Education |
An EFQM model self-assessment
exercise at a Spanish university
Juan Jose
´Tarı
´
Department of Business Management, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the EFQM model self-assessment in a Spanish
university.
Design/methodology/approach – A case study methodology is used based on five services
provided by a public university in Spain.
Findings – The findings show the steps that one university can follow in order to apply this exercise
in a successful manner, its benefits, its obstacles and its key factors such as management and
employee commitment, and the support to self-assessment teams (e.g. training, review).
Originality/value – The paper provides lessons for managers from other universities who wish to
develop a self-assessment exercise.
Keywords European Foundationfor Quality Management, Qualityimprovement,
Total quality management, Self assessment, Universities,Spain
Paper type Case study
Introduction
Total quality management (TQM) can improve the activities and performance of
private firms (Powell, 1995; Easton and Jarrell, 1998; Kaynak, 2003) and also the public
sector (Berman and West, 1995; Hides et al., 2004). Focusing on the latter, public
services have showed a different interest in quality. For instance, TQM has had a
limited success in educational administrations (Helms et al., 2001), and this sector ha s
applied the excellence models less frequently than other public services (McAdam and
Welsh, 2000).
TQM started to gain importance in higher education institutions (HEIs) in the late
eighties and early nineties. Pressure from a variety of stakeholders (students, the
government, the business community and the local community) led HEIs to make an
effort to improve their efficiency and efficacy, aiming to satisfy this array of
increasingly demanding customers. Such pressure resulted in changes in HEIs (Gore
et al., 1998; Davies et al., 2001; Hides et al., 2004), which led them to implement various
strategies. In this respect, many administrators have seen quality practices as a useful
strategy (Sohail et al., 2003). This way HEIs, and especially universities, began to
worry about quality and develop TQM programs, or formal assessment processes, on a
periodical basis.
These educational reforms have been related to the introduction of excellence
models (Mok, 2003). For instance, the European Foundation for Quality Management
(EFQM) methodology as a basis for self-assessment is rapidly emerging in the UK
education sector (Osseo-Asare and Longbottom, 2002). The EFQM model is a generic
instrument which can be successfully applied to a HEI as a tool for improvement.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
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JEA
44,2
170
Received April 2005
Revised August 2005
Accepted September 2005
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 44 No. 2, 2006
pp. 170-188
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/09578230610652051
Self-assessment is a comprehensive, systematic and regular review of an
organization’s activities and results set against a model of business excellence.
In this context, formal bodies were set up to carry out periodic quality assessments
in HEIs. Several countries have developed HEI self-assessment systems and
mechanisms, usually composed of initial self-assessment processes that are then
complemented with external assessment practices, and applying quality models such
as the ISO 9000 standard and EFQM model (Rosa et al., 2001).
The academic literature on self-assessment has studied the quality awards models
and their relationship with performance (Rahman, 2001), the self-assessment process
(Van der Wiele et al., 1996a, b; Ritchie and Dale, 2000; Samuelsson and Nilsson, 2002)
and the development of a self-assessment tool based on the criteria of quality awards
(Lee and Quazi, 2001). Although there are an increasing number of universities
adopting self-assessment (Hides et al., 2004), little empirical literature exists analysing
the self-assessment process in the education sector from an academic point-of-view.
The purpose of this paper is to analyse a complete EFQM model self-assessment
process used in a Spanish public university. More specifically, universities may be
evaluated in three major areas: teaching, research and service. This paper focuses on
the study of quality assessment in services. An analysis will be made of the
development of a self-assessment process, indicating its benefits, difficulties and key
factors in order to understand why it may succeed. A case study is used, considering
the analysis of primary and secondary data from five university services in a Span ish
university which have had success with self-assessment. This paper’s contribution is
the evidence provided by this successful exercise which it is hoped, may pro ve useful
to managers of other HEIs.
The paper begins with a literature review about self-assessment in HEIs followed
by a methodology section. The case study then describes the stages in the development
of a self-assessment exercise, the difficulties encountered, the benefits obtained and the
key factors involved. The paper finishes with a discussion of the results and reaches a
number of conclusions.
Literature review
Self-assessment and quality management systems are important in HEIs (Owlia and
Aspinwall, 1997; Rosa et al., 2001; Srikanthan and Dalrymple, 2004). In this respect,
two types of studies may be mentioned.
First, some authors have developed empirically validated instruments for quality
measurement in HEIs (Owlia and Aspinwall, 1998), for the measurement of quality
management culture in schools (Detert et al., 2003), or for the measurement of
administrative quality in universities (Waugh, 2002). The first study can be used to
measure quality dimensions (academic resources, competence, attitude and content),
the emphasis being on the teaching aspects of engineering education. The second
measures the quality management culture and contains nine constructs (shared vision,
customer focus, long-term focus, continuous improvement, teacher involvement,
collaboration, data-based decision making, systems focus and quality at same cost).
The scale of the third study may be used to reveal the academic staff perceptions of
administrative services, and may help university administrators to monitor the quality
of the service offered. Alongside these three studies, Mergen et al. (2000) also proposed
a framework of quality management in HEIs, identifying three dimensions (design,
An EFQM model
self-assessment
exercise
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